disambiguity

Do you have a relative with dementia? Please help with a website usability study (London)

I’m working on a website usability project for a charity that provides services to anyone affected by dementia. This project will help to ensure that we are delivering support and information services in the best possible way.

We will need an hour of your time on Monday 23 November in Central London. There will be other studies conducted throughout 2010, so please let us know if you’re interested but not available on this date.

If you’d like to participate or to find out more, please complete this form and we will contact you with more information. London travel expenses will be reimbursed.

If you know someone who might be interested in participating, please pass them this information.

Thanks very much for your help with this.

[Participate in Research] Are you on the market for a new phone, insurance or breakdown cover?

Are you currently looking at purchasing a new mobile phone, switching your insurance provider or getting breakdown cover for your car?

We’re looking for people who are not so technically savvy who might be available to help us with a small research project in London on 6-7 July. We’re after everyone from students to grandparents, so if this is not you, perhaps it would suit someone you know – feel free to pass this onto them!

You’ll get £40 for an hour of your time, we’ll come and meet you at a location that is mutually convenient (in and around Central London), and it is really very easy – we’re interested in your experience and feedback, that’s all! Actually most people find these sessions pretty fun!

Drupal7UX – The Audience Matrix Evolves (and you can play at home!)

Over the past week or so Mark and I have been working out the details that go on the panels of the Audience Matrix  that we shared with you last week (or dress-up-doll document as it has otherwise been named).  We’ve made a few changes and added a bunch of definitions.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

ROLES:

• Content Creator: a user who primarily creates, reviews, and edits content for a site. Key tasks: Add  content, edit content, find existing content, view list of content creation/revision tasks.
• Site Editor: a user who has authority to approve, edit or reject content and who may be able to manage some editorial workflow and user permissions. Key tasks: Add  content, edit content, find existing content, view list of content creation/revision tasks, review content, reject/feedback on content to original author, schedule content,
• Site Admin: manage user permissions, manage site structure, adding new content types, create and review reports and manage some site settings (RSS Publishing, IP Address Blocking). Key tasks: Manage user permissions, Add / Edit / Delete Content Types, Manage Information Architecture (site sections, sub-sections, taxonomy (as in, vocabulary), Create a report, Review a report.
• Site Builder: creates site from scratch by choosing, writing, customising modules and/or themes, manages setup and maintenance. Is a developer (for the purposes of audience definition, themers are considered developers). Key Tasks: Develop site functionality, implement site design.

question: who can/should be able to create new content types? who can create new site sections and subsections (vocabulary and/or terms)   etc.

TYPE OF SITE:

• Brochureware Site: hierarchical structure of relatively static content, often includes forms (eg. contact/feedback), may be multi-author
• Blog: sequence of chronological posts that may be assigned to categories, may also include ‘fixed’ pages, often includes comments, trackbacks, RSS feed, most often single author
• News: a categorical/hierarchical grouping of content usually ordered chronologically but often ‘curated’ by an editorial team, may also include  comments, trackbacks, RSS feed, often multi-author, often requires multiple templates
• Events: a combination of content supporting an event, including content about the event, a schedule/calendar of events, list of participants,  online registration, may also require online submissions, social networking functionality, news, email update list
• Social Site: comprises member profiles and communication between those member in the form of discussion forums, wikis, events, blogs, require member signup, subscription, RSS,

NO. OF USERS

• 1 : no permissions, no workflow, that user does everything (one stop shop) BUT most like to have simple requirements (how manage giving access to all functionality when the mostly won’t need it). Likely to generate small amounts of content.
• 2-5 : multiple authors, may require permissions, may require workflow (simple approval process), may require separation between content management tasks and site management tasks but usually not overly complicated requirements.
• 6-15: multiple authors and editors, likely to require permissions, likely to require workflow, likely to require separation between content management tasks and site management tasks may have some complex requirements, will have significant amount of content generated.
• 15+ : requires permission management (several permission profiles), probably requires workflow (content review/approval), likely to generate a lot of content to be managed and require content scheduling – it’s a complicated machine and it needs a whole section around managing the machine, let alone making the content to feed the machine. Involves a lot of content and likely complex taxonomy.

question: should it matter how much ‘experience’ you have with Drupal? Should we add another row for this? (Insider/Midsider/Outsider) – we can’t decide. One one level it seems like it does matter, but we also think that it shouldn’t matter… would adding this add unnecessary complexity? (For the time being we’re leaving this out).

PLAY ALONG AT HOME!

This is going to be a pretty instrumental tool for us on this project and we’ll be referring to it regularly. If you’re interested in checking it out in more detail or if you’d like to get more involved in this project, the perhaps you’d like your very own copy. Yes? Well, you’re in luck because you can now download a copy here: Audience Matrix PDF

HOW TO USE THE MATRIX:

Over the coming weeks we’re going to be inviting you to submit your ideas for revisions to the Drupal7 Admin interface and overall user experience. It will be very helpful for us all to use this document to help make sure that we’re designing for the 80% and not necessarily just for ourselves! And it is also a really great way to expose missing elements and possible flaws in our concepts. Using the document to test the example we show in the video above helped us to realise that we needed things like a close button on the dashboard (I know, d’uh!), a place to hold the user generated content from things like comment as well as contact forms, and got us thinking about a whole host of thorny permissions and workflow issues. (Don’t get me started!)

This is, however, a living document – we welcome your feedback and questions on the changes we’ve made and how we’re using it – so, please – let us have it!  (but don’t pay too much heed to the concept we’ve presented as an example in the video, it is very early days and it’s just one of many ideas we’re working on.)

Drupal7UX – Pimp Your Admin

You might remember we mentioned that we were going to kick off an activity we call ‘Pimp Your Admin’ at the recent Drupalcon conference – we have a few interesting screencasts already and now we’d like to invite you to join in!

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can bend it to your will – get it to do just about anything you need it to do. Same goes for it’s administration interface (admin).

Before we get to work on the Drupal7 Admin, we’d love to see what you out there have done to make the Drupal Admin System do what you need it to do, or just to work better for you and your project.

Here’s how we want to do it – simply take a little screencast, it seems to take us about six or seven minutes – and walk us through your admin system and show us what you’ve done, even if it’s just something tiny – to make Drupal work better for you.

You can check out some examples that others have done at the Drupal7UX YouTube Group then once you’ve recorded yours, upload it and post it to the group so we can take a look. (Of course, if you’d rather host it elsewhere, you can just leave a link to your preferred location in the comments below (thanks Brandonian, we’ve got a note of yours!)

We’re really looking forward to seeing your work and to see if some interesting trends start to emerge!

update: for those who ask, we’ve been using Silverback to record our screencasts. If you’re a Mac user and interested in User Experience you should have Silverback. It’s great and ridiculously affordable.

design by committee vs design by community (things we learned from the Drupal.org project)

Recently I presented a casestudy of things that we learned about designing with a community, the Drupal community, at the Interaction09 Conference in Vancouver. (I’m still trying to get my slides down to a reasonable size to post on Slideshare!) It was a short presentation so I thought I’d take some time to flesh out some of the ‘things we learned’ here for anyone who is interested. It certainly was an interesting, challenging and fairly unique project, and we’ll be doing more like this in the future, perhaps you will be too! This is the first post in a series of our learnings.

Often when I talk to other designers about the Drupal.org redesign project they can’t stop themselves from shuddering at the thought of having so many people involved in their design process.

It’s an understandable reaction – after all, how many of us have suffered design by committee, which is really it’s own special circle of hell, in which a group of somewhere between 3-12 (usually) stakeholders with various levels of authority (actual or effective) provide copious and detailed feedback to your designs – feedback that often conflicts either with itself, or with the objectives of the project, or just with the principles of good design. Usually these people are the people who are responsible for paying your salary or invoice. They can’t be ignored. As Whitney Hess tweeted and then blogged, they have itches that need to be scratched.

So, it seems logical that having thousands of people involved in the design process should be even worse right? Design by committee on steroids? Well, you might think so but, happily, you’d be wrong. It’s really a whole different beast with it’s own challenges and opportunities and – I’m happy to report – there is much more good than bad about design by community and it’s an approach that I’d encourage you to consider. (Unlike design by committee, which should be avoided at all costs.)

The main reason for the different experience is scale. Surprisingly, scale is your friend.

When you’re dealing with feedback from hundreds of people you don’t need to address every single issue raised. You’d be mad if you did and have no time for getting the design work done. Rather, what you’re looking for three things:

1. emergent trends: what are the issues that multiple people are mentioning or agreeing/disagreeing with. If half a dozen people mention it, it’s probably worth looking at.
2. unexpected comments: every now and then you’ll see something that takes you by surprise. (This doesn’t include comments like ‘your design sucks’ which you will get no matter how wonderful your design is – you have to learn to not be surprised by these!). When you get that ‘surprise’ feeling (you know the one) – pay attention, even if just one person mentions it.
3. obvious pickups: – with a few thousand fresh sets of eyes, obvious mistakes, things you’ve just left off or misspelled for example, will get picked up quickly. Acknowledge those as quickly as you can so that they don’t turn into big (and often dramatic) conversations.

The absolute best way to a respond to an issue is in your design, rather than in responding to comments on a blog, messageboard, flickr posting, tweet or wherever you’re gathering your feedback (and I’d encourage you to keep it fairly messy and don’t just do it in one place – more on that in a later post!). You should stay in touch with the conversation and respond when appropriate (again, that’s a whole other post!), but the ratio of your responses to comments should be at least 1:10, if not closer to 1:50

This is quite a departure for most of us who are used to consolidated feedback lists and having to respond to every piece of feedback we receive, to begin with it almost feels a little naughty (at least, it did for me!) – but it is a really necessary approach if you want to maintain your integrity and not reliquish your responsibilities as the designer.

Remember – just because you’re working with a community doesn’t make this a democratic process. Design should never be democratic. We’re not voting on interface elements here, we’re working with a community to let them help us the best way they can – by telling us about their community and their product, in this case the drupal.org website and what they use it for, and drupal itself of course. Communities aren’t designers – they can give you a lot of GREAT information to help you design well for them, but that’s the crux of the issue – you need to find ways to work with them so you can get from them what they do and know best, and so you can do what you do best – design great experiences.

A big part of your role on a project like this is facilitation and communication, but don’t let those roles waylay you from your most important responsibility, which is to do good design.

It’s a terrifying but exhilarating experience, this community design caper. If you have an appropriate project, I’d really encourage you to give it a try. I’ll be sharing more of what we learned soon!

Drupal.org redesign – help usability test Iteration 6 next week!

As you may have read, we’ll be doing some usability testing on the 6th iteration of the Drupal.org prototype in London next week. It seems like a great time to also kick off some crowdsourced usability testing, as we’d talked about earlier, and for any of you who’d like to get involved to do so!

(UPDATED!) Iteration six is now live here. I’d like to encourage you to take part in our Crowdsourced Usability Testing Campaign by doing a few tests yourself, wherever you are in the world, and contributing your findings back to the project.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Find some participants to take part – we want a mix of people along the spectrum of Drupal involvement from those who don’t know much to those who know lots and are super involved. Some tips for recruiting can be found here (feel free to add any other tips you have to our wiki!)
2. Take a look at the prototype and work out how you’re going to approach the interview – some interview tips and a sample script can be found here (again, feel free to add more!)
3. Work out a way to record your interview – some ideas here. Personally, I’ve found remote testing more hassle than it’s worth and much prefer to do in person interviewing. My technology of choice is a MacBook with Silverback installed for audio and video recording (you can get a 30 day trial for free). 
4. Do your interviews!
5. Share your interviews and findings! I’ve been exporting and posting some interviews on Vimeo, which is my preferred video sharing site. You can put yours wherever you like, just link to them from the comments of this post once they’re posted (and/or add them to the wiki where mine are now) – if you have some time to write up what you’ve learned as a result of the testing that would be fantastic! (If not, don’t worry, we’ll take a look through the video ourselves!)

That’s it! Not so hard at all, is it!

If you have any questions at all, post them here (no matter how silly they may sound, chances are others have exactly the same question or it’s something I forgot to cover in this post or on the wiki!) – I or someone else helpful will get back to you ASAP.

This is a great opportunity to help out with the Drupal project and a great chance to get some usability testing experience under your belt – which is a really fantastic skill to have, whatever aspect of design or development you’re most into. I really encourage you to give it a try and look forward to seeing what you come up with! I’ll be sharing my videos as soon as I can export them after usability testing sessions on Monday 3/11

If you’re able to do some testing early next week and post your feedback mid-late next week that would be fantastic. If this schedule doesn’t work for you – don’t fret – more iterations are coming hot on the heels of this one and more testing will be required and welcomed! You can get involved in the next few weeks if that suits you better.

Good luck, thank you and yay!

Drupal.org redesign – Participate in Usability Testing in London!

You’re going to be hearing more and more about usability testing in the coming weeks! As you know, we’ve been including Drupal.org users in the redesign process from before the first wireframe was sketched, and we continue to include both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in the process – currently in the form of usability testing the prototypes as it moves from iteration to iteration.

We recently conducted some tests at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin which allowed us to talk to a bunch of European Drupal Users (and non-users too!). Now we’d like to do some usability testing in London (where I’m based).

If you’re in London on Monday 3 November and would like to participate – please email me leisa@disambiguity.com and let me know where you will be (I can meet you somewhere convenient) and when would suit you. I’ll need around 30-40mins of your time.

I’m looking for a mix of people who know a *lot* about Drupal (and are involved in the community) through to people who know not much about Drupal but who have some interest in content management systems for websites – whether for your own blog perhaps, or for a company or organisation you’re affiliated with.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any cash incentives for this project, but you will receive much gratitude and lots of good karma for helping build good user experience into an open source project.

I hope to hear from you soon!

User research for Drupal.org redesign – what we’ve done, what we’re doing

If you’re following the Drupal.org redesign project, you will no doubt have noticed that we’ve been busy getting to know the Drupal community. It’s been fun so far, and we look forward to doing much more.

I thought you might enjoy a little heads up of what we’ve done and what our plans are (keeping in mind, of course, that a project quite like this has never been planned before, so we reserve the right to switch course at any point in the future if another course looks better!)

‘Lies, damn lies and statistics’

Now, as you can probably tell, we place a lot more stock in talking to the community than poring over numbers (‘what’ is interesting, ‘why’ is much more useful!), but we’re looking at whatever statistical information is being thrown our way (none of it lies, I’m sure! I just really like that quote)

Here’s a little sample you may or may not be familiar with:

Drupal.org has 300,000+ users and gains on average 300 new users per day. There are 375,000 discussion threads between the forums, mailings lists, groups, etc. Our community is active with a 5:1 response rate on general discussions, 4:1 response rate on support discussions and 10:1 response rate on development discussions. Our community is large, engaged and growing. (excerpt from the Redesign Project RFP)

We’re looking at search terms, paths through the site, and other bits and pieces that are somewhat interesting. But nowhere near as interesting as talking… so, onto that part.

Drupalcon Interviews

Mark and I were fortunate to be invited to attend Drupalcon in Szeged, Hungary a couple of weeks ago and we took the opportunity to meet some of the Drupal community whilst we were there. I think we ended up conducting about a dozen depth interviews, between 30-60mins each, with a wide range of participants from a well known ‘maintainer’, through experienced and less experienced Drupal developers, to complete newbies, to people who sell Drupal solutions to their clients – and people from all over the world!

During these interviews we talked a lot about each persons experience with Drupal, with Drupal.org, with the Drupal Community – online and in ‘real’ life. I also asked people to show me a little of how they used Drupal.org which was very enlightening – allowing me to better understand what are the really important bits of Drupal.org for different kinds of users, and which ones of these are all but hidden from the uninitiated!

This was an incredibly worthwhile exercise and really fast-tracked us into understanding both the key issues with the drupal.org website as well as the dynamics of the Drupal community and the different types of experiences that people have of Drupal.org depending on where they sit on the ‘Drupal Learning Curve’.

Recruiting for research participants – the survey

No doubt you’re aware that we’ve had a ‘survey’ running over the past week or so – the purpose of this is to get in touch with people who are willing to help us out with some more structured feedback once we start getting into the design phase and we have a prototype that we’ll be iterating very regularly (at least weekly is the current plan).

If you’ve completed the form, you *may* get an email from us in the next few months asking for your help – this will involve us taking about 45 mins of your time to have a virtual interview – we’ll be using some screen sharing tools so that you can take a look at the prototype, and we can watch how you’re using it, and we’ll have a bit of a chat, ask you some questions etc. as well. It will be fun, and it will also mean that we won’t waste piles of time designing something that isn’t going to work well for the community OR for people who are new to Drupal because – happily, we have recruited lots of people who know little or nothing about Drupal to help us with this exercise – hurrah!

Want to know more about who responded? Here’s some snippets (apologies for the cut off text on the graphs, this is what Google is giving me and I don’t have time/inclination to remake them!):

1024 people have completed the survey so far. Respondents represent  78 different countries and speak about 56 different languages!! (Not including C++, en-au, English (UK), Java, PHP, E Bonics which some people offered as their native language – we take your point!)

10% of respondents don’t know Drupal at all. We’re looking forward to meeting them! Looking after these guys is one area we really need to do better with on drupal.org

Of course, we also need to look after the existing community well – and there are lots of opportunities for improvement – fortunately we have 540 people from the Drupal community who have already put their hands up to help out.

My favourite thing about this chart though is the 359 people who answered ‘not yet!’ when asked if they were a part of the Drupal community. It might not be particularly scientific, but it really does give a sense of the potential that we’re working with here!

Personally, I was quite surprised with the spread of ‘roles’ that people said they were responsible for. Most respondents selected more than one ‘role’ in this survey and that maps with the interviews we did when we were at Drupalcon – for this reason, we’re leaning towards the view that ‘role’ isn’t really a very good way to break down the different types of people we’re designing for (into personas, perhaps) and we’re leaning more towards a breakdown based on ‘closeness’ to the community. More on that soon.

And what are people doing here?

12% seeking ‘overview’ information about Drupal and what it can do
5% looking to be ‘sold’ on Drupal
28% looking to use Drupal to build a website (introductory information, tutorials, modules, themes etc.)
9% comparing Drupal with other CMS options
20% looking for API-level details about Drupal as a content management framework
21% looking for themes, looking for information on how to make Drupal beautiful
40% looking for an answer to a particular problem I’m having with Drupal
51% looking for Drupal modules
22% participating in the Drupal community – I’m a regular
22% exploring the Drupal community – I’m a lurker
30% checking up on Drupal news
9% other (which was frequently to do with checking on projects, issues etc.)

Other channels

We’re also live on Twitter (twitter.com/drupalredesign), Flickr (flickr.com/groups/drupalredesign/) and Slideshare (slideshare.net/group/drupalorg-redesign-project) and taking feedback, suggestions, inspiration – whatever you can throw at us.

Thank you!

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has participated so far – even after such a short time, I really feel as though we know so much more about this project, its rather long history, and some of the background to issues than we would without your input.

We have to work very quickly on this project, so we don’t have a lot of time to labour over all of this information, but we will continue to work openly so if you don’t see us paying attention in the work that we’re putting back to you, there are lots of opportunities to set us straight!

I look forward to working with you more!

Try Google Docs for survey or recruitment forms

Just a quick note to recommended using Google Docs ‘forms’ as a free tool to manage surveys and recruitment. (Choose New, then Form).

We recently wanted to invite people to participate in user research for the drupal.org redesign project – as a part of this we had a short screener we wanted to run people through so that we can target research appropriately in the coming months (and also get some interesting stats – more on that soon!).

Initially I was planning to use Ethnio, as it is purpose built for this, looks pretty and has a kind of nice DHTML ‘not-popup’. I couldn’t get it working though, so then turned to the ever trusty Survey Monkey, but… eh, so ugly! At the last minute I thought of Google Docs and that’s where we stayed.

Super easy to set up, and a nice clean looking interface out of the box, plus no worries being charged for having too many responses. Easy peasy.

We have since almost 900 responses in a just few days and it seems to have held up nicely.

So, if you are looking for a nice tool to use as a screener or a questionnaire and you’re not too fussed about customising the look and feel, I’d heartily recommend Google Docs.

Disclaimer, disclaimer etc. I’m sure Ethnio works beautifully for lots of people. I tried to get it working for several days without luck and by the time support got back to me, we had hundreds of survey responses to the Google version. I’m also sure you can make Survey Monkey look grand, but I don’t know how and didn’t want to spend the time finding out.

Help shape a new application and earn £40 for just 30 mins of your time

We’re at the early stages of developing an interesting new application and have a few ideas that we’d like some feedback on.

If you have a spare half hour on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday next week (4,5,6 August) and are in or near central London and you’re interested in helping out, read on!

We’re looking for a wide range of people but you need to either be

1. currently using or planning to use internet on your mobile phone in the next couple of months
2. fairly social (have some friends, go out and meet said friends fairly regularly).
3. a little web savvy, but *not* someone who twitters or updates their Facebook status more than once a day. (If you’ve heard of Cuil already, for example, you’re probably not quite the audience, but you probably know someone who is – get them to contact me!)
4. not working in the internet, mobile/telecoms or travel industries
   

As ever, you (or the person you dob in) will be rewarded for your efforts to the tune of £40 – for just 30 mins!

See -  we really value your opinion!

email me: leisa.reichelt@gmail.com
or pass this on to likely suspects!

thank you!